This is the rhetorical question my husband half-heartedly threw towards my hastily retreating body as I practically ran down the escalator from the departure area of Newark airport two weeks ago.

We had just dropped our daughter, our oldest child, off for her overnight flight to the UK and grad school in Scotland. The airport goodbye was not unusual for us, as she had attended university in England for the past three years as an undergrad, but this departure was definitely different.

This was the farewell to parenting life as we have known it for the past 21 years.

A week before we had ventured into our first US college drop-off when we drove our tightly packed SUV up to western NY to move our son in for his first year. Though he could barely breathe wedged between pillows, suitcases and plastic crates, it was fun to actually drive a kid into their new home and be greeted by a cappella groups serenading the car.

It was a two-day move-in/orientation process, during which we could easily see how this school, roommate and new baseball team was indeed a great fit for our youngest child. Saying goodbye to him outside his dorm wasn’t even as hard as I had expected because deep-down I knew I was only a five-hour drive away (easier and cheaper than a six-hour flight) and that I actually had our daughter home for another week.

One more week before I had to face the reality of the empty nest.

Of course those last seven days of packing, planning and snuggling with the dog and cat sped by, and before we knew it, it was just the two of us driving home as tears streamed down my face. Opening the front door to the expectant, excited faces of the pets and walking into silence unleashed the full-on ugly cry. I’ve never before woken in the morning, even after my father died, with my eyes nearly swollen shut.

Our daughter had been home for seven weeks this summer, and since her masters program is for one full calendar year, I knew she would never again be home to “live” but would merely be visiting on school or work breaks instead. Yes, we may have our son home for summers (at least maybe one), but there was no denying that we had experienced a loss. And we were grieving.

Both my father-in-law and my father died unexpectedly in their mid-60s, and I work part-time as the marketing director for a funeral home, so I am quite familiar with the concept of bereavement and grief. Yes, I know my kids haven’t died and that they are actually in the midst of one of the greatest experiences of their lives, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that I feel a profound sense of loss.

A loss of childhood, being needed, of knowing…. their feelings, their friends, their daily routine. I’ll miss playing tea party and reading bedtime stories. I’ll miss giving the snuggly smell test after their first solo showers. I’ll miss gathering the piles of drawings and doodles and tucking them into drawers to keep forever. I’ll even miss huddling by the dugout watching early-season baseball trying to keep warm in my flimsy spring jacket. These are what our family calls warm and fuzzy memories, and, boy, my life is feeling pretty stark and cold right now.

“Now’s the time to reinvent yourself!” “Find a new hobby, travel, date again.” I’ve heard it all, and I know it’s true, but it will take some time to get used to focusing on me again. And not feeling guilty for it.

I will write the book I’ve been talking about since my dad died. I will enjoy easier (and cheaper) grocery trips and dinner times, less laundry, and less nagging to pickup around the house. But I will also still wax poetic about their childhoods and spend time in their empty, clean bedrooms looking around in disbelief. I will look knowingly out at the elementary school parents walking their kids to school and silently implore them:

Do you know how fast it goes? Drink in every moment, savor every sound, relish every touch because before you know it you’ll be trying to find a warm, feathered corner in your empty nest.

My father died quietly in an ICU hospital bed five years ago today. Finally disconnected from the tubes and machines that were keeping him alive, but just barely, he slipped away into what I hoped wasn’t a vast black hole of nothingness.

Instead, I imagined his soul easing gently from its broken confines and escaping the cold, brightly lit hospital room for the dark, clear skies stretching over the Long Island Sound.

I remember what I said to my mother as we walked from the room and looked at his body for the last time: “It’s just a shell.” For his body was now empty. In an instant, void of laughter, love, feeling. Those traits, so deeply interwoven in my father’s personality, I desperately hoped had flown away with his spirit.

It wasn’t until four years later that I discovered this was true.

It was May 2014, about two weeks after the fourth anniversary of his death, that my two brothers, mother and I visited a medium. I’ve always been a “believer” in the paranormal: relishing a good ghost story, trying to uncover hidden ESP talents with my best childhood friend, combing through horoscopes with my grandmother, but trying to contact the dead was certainly a new endeavor. Among the four of us attending the session (which was with four mediums), I’d call two of us believers and the other two healthy skeptics. So we had a nice balance of predilection and preconception with eight of us in the room that night.

Our session was two hours long, and I recorded every minute. Thankfully so, because it’s quite easy to forget details, what with trying to discern the validations and messages that each of us privately sought. My maternal grandmother and grandfather were there, albeit briefly (my mom outrightly asked them to “Step aside!”), but Dad definitely took center stage.

When I reviewed the recording again yesterday, I realized that every mention of my father in some way related exactly to his experience and personality. One of the younger mediums in particular seemed to connect to me right away. Within the first five minutes, she was feeling an older male energy, seeing siblings, and a hand writing furiously and with great emotion.

She described the man as being a sharp dresser and concerned about his appearance, in particular his hair. She saw thinning hair on top and a tendency to try to divert attention from it. Suddenly she saw Mr. Drummond, from the old 80s TV show Different Strokes, and immediately I laughed in acknowledgement. For this was a show I watched often with Dad and it spawned one of his popular sayings (of which he had many): “Whatchyou talkin’ about, Willis?”

She went on about his need to feel well appointed, or put together before leaving the house… always making sure, “I look good.” Verbatim, this is another playful saying we attribute to Dad, teasing him about his vanity.

After a few minutes, she turned to me again and said she had a special message for me, but that because it was so filled with emotion, she couldn’t look at me while delivering it as she felt she might cry. She elaborated: “He said, ‘I hear you.’ And I don’t know if you continuously say when things are down, ‘Why did you have to leave?’ And he’s making me feel like you are very broken-hearted still and he wants to acknowledge the struggles you’re going through… he wants to recognize your strength, that you just keep going… And he wanted to make it clear that he heard you when you questioned if he could. He heard everything you said. ‘I heard her. Let her know that I heard her when she thought that I couldn’t hear and everybody else thought I was not there. I heard her.’ ”

Well of course this personal message caused me to cry immediately but I also smiled because I felt he was speaking directly to me, bearing witness not only to my heartbreak but also to my spiritual awakening… the seismic shift in my perception of life and after-life.

Yes, I sat by his bed in ICU for over six hours talking to his unconscious body both verbally and in my mind when I could no longer find my voice. I even held my cell phone to his ear so my youngest brother, who was out of town, could say his good-byes. Because I felt even then, from the core of my being, that he could hear us.

I didn’t know, however, that he could hear me six months later in New Orleans. We were asked to attend his company’s annual conference (a tradition in my family for over 30 years) to participate in a memorial tribute. Needless to say, it was a difficult experience, and I had a breakdown the first night. Alone in my hotel room, I found myself silently screaming at my tear-streaked, swollen-faced reflection in the bathroom mirror: “Why? Why did you have to leave? Why?”

He hears me.

So Dad, I’ll keep talking, and writing furiously, to you and about you to keep up the conversation. Thanks for listening.

If you’re a pet lover and that first sentence didn’t turn you off right away, let me tell you the story of how a dog became my unexpected savior.

During the summer of 2009, I finally caved to my children’s incessant requests for a dog. One rainy day, we started perusing the Internet for the perfect furry friend who matched all of our keywords: Small but not yappy, hypoallergenic, companion, easy-going, family-loving, good with cats (a little mouse problem had made me give in on that one years earlier). The great Google engine kept throwing out a breed we had never heard of: Coton de Tulear.

Now, being a francophile of sorts, my little ears perked right up. The royal dog of Madagascar? Tell me more! Bred specifically to be a companion who does not require a dog run or constant exercise? Sign me and my couch up! Hair not fur, so it doesn’t shed? This couldn’t get any better! Ultra-popular in France but not so much in the U.S., this little white fluffy dog looks and feels like a cotton ball, thus its eloquent French moniker.

Amazingly, we found an experienced breeder in CT, my home state, and so the lengthy road to dog ownership began. The following winter, we were on line at a California amusement park when I received the email that our litter was born on February 22, 2010. All of us could barely contain our excitement as we monitored the breeder’s pictures and updates until the 6 week appointment when we could visit and choose our puppy.

The big visit was scheduled for Good Friday, so I took the kids out of school the Thursday before and we headed to Mystic to stay overnight. My daughter was 12 and my son 9 at the time, and sitting on that sunny deck in early Spring as adorable puppies jumped all over us warmed my heart and assured me I had made the right leap of faith. We left the breeder with a first choice and hoped he would be ours in three weeks.

Instead of driving all the way back home to NJ, we headed to my parent’s house in western CT to stay overnight, and that was when I learned my father was having health problems.

Shortness of breath and intestinal issues had sent him to his GP that day instead of work, and he had come home from the appointment with a referral to visit a cardiologist the following week. I was surprised to see him open the front door that Friday afternoon, but his smiling face and eagerness to hear all about the puppies belied any internal problems he was having. As he ventured down to the basement to find the old dog crate for me, though, I remember volunteering to help–something I had never had to offer to my father before.

One week later, he saw the cardiologist and called to tell me about the appointment. I happened to be in the car driving to Richmond, Virginia, and my 20th college reunion at the time, and was quite surprised to answer a call initiated by my father–if he was calling me and I wasn’t at work, I knew something was wrong. I could hear it in his voice, too, the utter disappointment and resignation. The doctor had told him he needed stents put into his heart and advised him to cancel an upcoming business trip to Chile. He also told him to get a colonoscopy to check the intestinal bleeding first, and that’s what ultimately put him in the hospital for emergency abdominal surgery 8 days later.

Amidst many, many hospital visits and miles logged between NJ and Norwalk, I tried to keep the puppy planning on schedule for the kids. I canceled the first pickup because Dad had unexpectedly gone back into ICU, but we managed to get out there about 10 days late after spending the night visiting with my father. He had been in the hospital three weeks at that point, and it was getting harder and harder to envision him coming home.

If things were normal, I would have taken the puppy right to my parent’s house so they and their dog could meet our new addition but instead, I used Norwalk Hospital as a pitstop and let the dog out on their front lawn while my mom came down from ICU to see him. Had I known I would never see my dad conscious again, I would have gone upstairs, but Mom said they were trying to find a room to move him out of ICU so I naively thought the worst had passed.

It hadn’t. The worst came six days later when he died, back in ICU, on the night of May 13. My family, including the puppy in his brand-new carrier, had rushed to the hospital to be with Dad during his final, unconscious hours. I marched right upstairs willing the puppy to remain silent in what I hoped looked like a black duffel bag on my shoulder. My children sat with the puppy, Bogey, in the waiting room while I went to be by my father’s side.

Bogey never left my side from that day on. Every sob I made, every tear that fell, he was right there to nuzzle and comfort me. Even now, when I’m upset with my computer or at some disturbing report on the news, he senses my dismay and rushes onto my lap, eager to put me at ease. When I sat devastated in front of the TV as I learned of the 26 killed at Sandy Hook that December day, he was with me, licking my tears away.

Bogey was named after a golf term… I used to joke he was “one over” my pet quota as I never thought I would own a cat AND a dog. I also never imagined a dog would help save me from drowning in grief and sorrow. That caring for and loving an animal would get me through my darkest days. This Bogey has won over my heart.

“My thoughts are with you / Holding hands with your heart to see you.” Earth, Wind & Fire

I cried on the way to Trader Joe’s today.

What is it about being in the car alone that makes every wistful thought, every premonition of the future and mournful reminiscence of the past come surging to the surface? It must be the lulling monotony of the drive that causes our minds to tiptoe into corners not visited during the hustle and bustle of everyday life. The solitude. And sometimes the soundtrack. Such was the case today when September by Earth, Wind and Fire came on my radio about halfway through my dreaded Saturday expedition to fill our barren cupboards before another snowstorm.

I was already wistful because I was alone and my 17-year-old daughter had accompanied me on my last grocery run. Today she was out with friends, so I left my husband and son home and set out on my own. I was thinking–as I have been doing a lot lately–that “next year at this time,” there will be no more shopping trips together, no more “binge-watching” of girly favorites, no more shared cups of tea. My eldest child, my only daughter, is going to college in the fall. And not just any college easily accessible by car or train, but University with a capital U… across the Atlantic Ocean in England.

Today, as soon as I heard the opening query of September: “Do you remember,” I was immediately transported back to the tiny living room of our family’s first home. Hailey was maybe six months old and firmly perched on my hip with one chubby little hand grabbing my shoulder and the other curled around my own. We were dancing and singing the morning away and this was her favorite song. Maybe it’s because she’s a September baby; maybe she had some pre-birth intuition that the 21st night of September they were singing about was the night of my first date with her father. For whatever reason, whenever we were bored and lonely, that CD went into the stereo.

Over the past 17 years, those familiar strains have made me smile and wax nostalgic with her, telling her the same story over and over (as both of my children tell me I tend to do). Today though, it just made me cry. How could so many years have passed since those sweet baby-dancing days that she was actually leaving home to live in another country in eight short months?

It’s not the distance that’s getting me, really (the fact that a whole OCEAN will be separating us), for I know I’d be feeling just as melancholy if she were going to the state next door. It’s simply the going. Leaving family and home. Growing up. This will be a (air quote) Huge Life Change, and like the death of my father, I’m unsure I’m prepared to handle it. But how can we truly prepare for something we haven’t yet experienced?

This time I have a little notice… time to wrap my head around it, get used to being the only female in the house, start following sports more closely to keep up with dinnertime conversation. I think that part of me won’t recognize it’s real, though, until we step on that plane at the end of summer. Another night in September will make its mark on the lyrics of my life, and the memory of our hands clutched in harmony will have to sustain me as she forges ahead in pursuit of her own song.

]]>https://kellybmusing.com/2015/01/31/holding-hands-with-your-heart/feed/5brockly626SeptemberYou’ve got mail. But not on the weekends.https://kellybmusing.com/2013/02/06/youve-got-mail-but-not-on-the-weekends/
https://kellybmusing.com/2013/02/06/youve-got-mail-but-not-on-the-weekends/#commentsWed, 06 Feb 2013 16:30:32 +0000http://kellybmusing.com/?p=186Continue reading →]]>I’ll admit it, I’m upset at the news this morning. I can’t stop thinking about it. The world is changing before our very eyes, and I’m mourning the loss already.

Today the USPS announced it will no longer deliver mail on Saturdays beginning in August. The move will save the failing company two billion dollars a year as they struggle to keep up with today’s digital world of email, online shopping and electronic bills.

In my little New Jersey town, we began seeing the signs a couple years ago: Deliveries each day growing lighter and lighter. Some days the dog and I don’t even hear the tell-tale thump of mail hitting my foyer floor. And then there was the postcard last summer telling us that our beloved postman, Andy, would no longer be our mailman. We were on a first-name basis with Andy, and he was always trying to win over my little Napolean watchdog. Witness to many highs and lows in our lives over the past seven years, he gently offered condolences when he noticed the influx of sympathy cards and gift baskets he was helping to deliver.

For my generation and all those that came before, getting mail was an event in and of itself. It was such an anticipated occurrence, in fact, that my brother and I used to play “Mail” on rainy days. We’d spend a good hour creating the perfect mailbox for ourselves, decorating old shoeboxes with bright markers and maybe a few shiny flakes of glitter. Then we’d head off to our separate bedrooms to write our “mail” in secret, before sneaking back to the other’s mailbox and depositing our treasures inside.

My kids will never know the sweet thrill of anticipation waiting for mail to arrive. Nor will they ever eagerly volunteer to run down to the end of the driveway to gather the day’s greetings. My daughter will never fill shoeboxes with sappy lovesick cards from boyfriends far away.

It makes me sad.

I treasure physical memories and take great comfort in surrounding myself with these sweet, poignant reminders of the way life used to be. It’s the best kind of security blanket, one that can’t be replicated with a cold abbreviated email or text.

I wonder how my kids and theirs will be able to wrap themselves in nostalgia on a chilly Sunday morning. But then again, nothing lasts forever. Cards and letters become yellow and torn. They burn and fly away to land as dusty freckles upon some other facade, oblivious to their prior stature. Or maybe they wash away in a hurricane, their inky tributes becoming blurry stripes of indecipherable sentiment.

Does it mean our emotional archives will now only exist on a thumb drive or in the “cloud” somewhere? Maybe it doesn’t matter, as long as they are inside us. And the only way to pass them from one inside to the other is through stories… the most traditional way of recording history!

So tonight at dinner, ask the kids to put down the phones because you’re going to tell them a story about mailboxes and love letters (with maybe a few 8 tracks and typewriters thrown in for fun).

]]>https://kellybmusing.com/2013/02/06/youve-got-mail-but-not-on-the-weekends/feed/1brockly626blackmailboxLiving in Shades of Gray (and hoping there’s more than Fifty)https://kellybmusing.com/2013/02/04/living-in-shades-of-gray-and-hoping-theres-more-than-fifty/
https://kellybmusing.com/2013/02/04/living-in-shades-of-gray-and-hoping-theres-more-than-fifty/#commentsMon, 04 Feb 2013 22:52:55 +0000http://kellybmusing.com/?p=179Continue reading →]]>We live in a world of extremes, and it’s never been more apparent to me than in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting.

Extreme makeovers. Extreme sports. Extreme climate. Extreme religion.

It all boils down to an extreme reality which isn’t particularly real at all. (Are we really supposed to think the Kardashians or Honey Boo Boo are an accurate representation of reality?) I believe the influx of “reality” programming has exemplified a cosmic shift of thought and experience that is exactly the opposite of what reality should mean to all of us.

If reality can be defined as the here and now… the Present… it can be mapped as the middle point on a timeline between the Past and the Future. In my little bible of Zen and the Art of Happiness, Alan Watt professes:

Zen is simply… that state of centeredness which is here and now.

I never realized the importance of the center until I saw the extreme polarization which arose during the last presidential election and again during the latest gun control debate. Why does it seem that we are all running to the extremes? Taking sides and viewing every political/social/religious topic in the comic-book starkness and simplicity of solid black or white?

Where’s the gray? The ability to soften the solid edges and open your mind to the possibility of new thought and opinion? Why suddenly are we a nation of either Tea Partyists or flaming liberals? Religious zealots or atheists? No control on gun sales or abolishment of all guns everywhere?

Living in a world of extremes thwarts our ability to find that state of centeredness… happiness in the here and now. Blind faith and polarization are like blackout curtains shutting out the light of hope, creativity and compassion.

I have been amazed at the forums and posts I have read on both sides of the gun control debate which take the “black or white” approach, and I’ve been particularly scared by the extremist views of some gun owners who want no restrictions to their rights because they believe the government is going to turn on us some day and therefore they must be armed to fight in the revolution. They think we are all being naive, and as I have seen in the vehemency of their posts, nothing will sway them from their blind assumptions. No hope for change here.

There have always been extremists in our society and there always will be, but lately it seems we are all flocking to one side or the other leaving a vast, desolate space in the middle where nothing can grow or flourish.

If “change” had a color, it would be gray, and the shades of gray between black and white are endless. Until we meet on this gradient middle ground, change and hope for the future are stymied.

]]>https://kellybmusing.com/2013/02/04/living-in-shades-of-gray-and-hoping-theres-more-than-fifty/feed/1brockly626Shades-of-gray, gun-control, sandy-hookIn Pursuit of Happiness (and a little Zen)https://kellybmusing.com/2013/01/04/in-pursuit-of-happiness-and-a-little-zen/
https://kellybmusing.com/2013/01/04/in-pursuit-of-happiness-and-a-little-zen/#commentsFri, 04 Jan 2013 18:48:54 +0000http://kellybmusing.com/?p=173Continue reading →]]>Happy Friday. I’ve decided that every Friday will be deemed such as I begin my pursuit of the Art of Happiness and I would love to have you join me.

Zen and the Art of Happiness by Chris Prentiss

Our journey begins with a little book of big ideas, and my 15-year-old daughter gave it to me for my birthday last summer. She knew intuitively that I was stressed and unhappy… overworked and stymied creatively by my job, worried about my mother selling her house now that she had bought a new one, concerned about our cat’s health and then my own when my doctor found a lump in my breast.

I was too stressed and busy that summer to even begin the lovely little book she had chosen for me. Besides, I was consumed with worry and wonder about this new vast plateau on which I now found myself: middle age.

It began on schedule with the big 4-0: A few months in, my father-in-law died. Two years later my father followed. My company was laying off staff in my department, piling the work on me and taking away any writing opportunities. I’d been married almost 20 years, worked throughout, had a daughter and a son, a dog and a cat. It seemed all my life until 40 was focused on the next big event, when suddenly I realized I had ticked off life’s milestones and found there was no longer any universal plan or promise. Certainly I wasn’t looking forward to the next big change, menopause. So, I spent much of my early forties embroiled in the quintessential mid-life crisis (minus the cute sports car and pool boy).

There is only one way to achieve lasting happiness. That way is simply: Be happy.

After I rid my head of the annoying 80s lyrics, “Don’t worry, be happy,” I asked myself, “Wow, could it really be that simple?” I grew up in a glass-is-half-full, “I think I can” household where Nego, Nego thoughts were not allowed, but still my woeful Wednesday birthright managed to trump that positivity at times. I think though, that I am now ready for a positive takover.

The summer ended in late September, and with it my job of 10 years and my worry over my health after a mammogram determined I had a benign cyst. It was time to pursue my happiness and change my perception of life and work. I began with a blogging class and the creation of kellybmusing.

Creative fulfillment, check.

But what about the nagging feeling that you have nothing left to look forward to except getting older, grayer, and fatter? That adulthood is just dealing with one depressing challenge after another? Losing loved ones, jobs, weathering super storms and power outages, paying ever-increasing bills, watching violence escalate at home and abroad.

According to this book, it all begins with a simple perception–a foundation of thought and philosophy that promises to change our world:

Every event that befalls me is absolutely the best possible event that could occur.

I’m assuming most of you are smirking right now and uttering “yeah, right” at your computer screens. I did the same, and it took me a couple months to ponder this before I could move on to understand how it could possibly be true in a world sometimes overwhelmed with negativity and violence.

I’ve lost three family members in the past four years, all of them on a Thursday.

A chilly Thursday in November 2008–Thanksgiving in fact–ended not with post-turkey coma and pumpkin-pie-smeared faces being shooed up to bed, but with my father-in-law being rushed to the hospital after suffering a heart attack in front of his family, including his four grandchildren.

We had enjoyed a postcard-perfect holiday: board games, football, food and family with Granddad offering to play the piano for us after dessert. It was unusual to receive an impromptu concert without prodding, so all of us were eager to focus on his rendition of a family favorite, Chattanooga Choo-Choo (or as he liked to call it, the Cat Who Chewed Your New Shoes). When he collapsed walking from the piano to the sofa though, our worlds collectively stopped.

That Thursday was the first time I felt the full shock of my family’s mortality. That blinding realization that we aren’t going to live forever. That death is the one common denominator among every living thing. I remember the first time I was confronted with death… as an 8th grader, my good friend’s mother was killed by a motorcycle as she crossed the street. I was terribly saddened for her and also scared as hell to let my parents out of my sight for a long time. I lay in bed at night while the sour weight of mortality settled into my stomach… a gnawing beast that continued to rear its head every so often as I grew up.

But part of growing up, and living, is being able to push that festering feeling away, for how are we to enjoy life if we are constantly worried about death? It’s a coping mechanism inherit in us all so that we can persevere, keep going even when it feels like we can’t take another step. It’s a trait that was in full effect when even as we held the funeral service for my father-in-law and endured his loss in the following years, I still could not fathom my own father’s mortality or the possibility that he could also die in his sixties.

Another Thursday, this time in May 2010, was the day we lost my father. That afternoon, my husband, children and I rushed to the hospital an hour and a half away to say our good-byes even though it was a one-sided farewell. After 26 days in the hospital growing progressively worse, he had lost consciousness the night before because he never woke up that Thursday. Never again looked at me with his chocolate-brown eyes that were always crinkled small with a smile. But I know he was there. He heard us and felt our presence even as his was growing lighter, ready to float gently out of our reach.

That Thursday night, I went home to my parent’s house after saying good-bye to my father in a sterile, cold hospital room, just as my husband had come home one and a half years earlier after the same farewell.

Two and a half years later, my family again rushed to the hospital on a crisp Thursday afternoon but this time it was to the veterinary hospital to say good-bye to our ten-year-old cat, Mulligan. As any pet owner knows, animals are truly part of your family and losing them can sometimes be just as hard as losing a person. We all loved this cat, and his quick demise due to kidney disease left us no time to come to terms with losing our first pet. The fact that I was again in a car racing to say good-bye to a loved one in a hospital on a Thursday afternoon did not go unnoticed to my crazy mournful memory. The difference this time is that we were too late, he had passed minutes before we got there. Still, I could barely keep myself from sobbing uncontrollably the rest of the day and night.

That loss was just another layer of grief upon a calendar of gray Thursdays, growing blacker with each year. Every loss endured after the first is somehow colored by the experience, made darker because of the reminder of earlier losses. But the blackness is really a gradient, with an ever-lightening stroke of gray. The burden of grief, though when it first happens seems it will swallow you whole, dissipates over time weaving itself into a security blanket that actually offers a measure of comfort. You’ve been there before, you know how to deal with this. You can help others who are floundering in the blackness for the first time, grab their hand and kick for the surface together. This is what I hope to do with my writing.

]]>https://kellybmusing.com/2013/01/03/why-i-hate-thursdays-and-how-theyve-helped-me-grow/feed/0brockly626death, pet, cat, lossThe Best Presenthttps://kellybmusing.com/2013/01/02/the-best-present/
https://kellybmusing.com/2013/01/02/the-best-present/#commentsWed, 02 Jan 2013 21:57:54 +0000http://kellybmusing.com/?p=156Continue reading →]]>I realized something at midnight January 1, 2013, as my family and I watched the ball drop: New Year’s is the only truly universal celebration. While the networks panned over clips of song and glitter from all corners of the globe and my own family toasted and cheered and reeled through our lofty resolutions, I was struck by an overwhelming sense of camaraderie with the world.

It seems for this one night, we all are given to a collective pause … a time of reflection and resolution. A moment where we mark the inevitable passage of time by trying to understand the events of the past and resolve to somehow do better in the future.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a harder time trying to understand the past than this December when 26 people were brutally murdered at a school 20 minutes from my hometown. Twenty of those lost were six- and seven-year old first graders.

The magnitude and horror of this latest incident of gun violence still doesn’t seem like it can possibly be true. That Friday, I sat paralyzed in disbelief and despair listening to the news coverage as it unfolded. Willing it to be wrong, drowning in its cruel reality, just as I did the morning of September 11, 2001.

How can we hope to understand such insanity and tragedy? To put it into any sort of perspective that means something to our collective consciousness? I’m not sure we can, and frankly I don’t want to devote time to analyzing a mentally ill man whose goal was to have the world talking about him and his horrific actions.

Before any clinking of champagne glasses and choruses of Auld Lang Syne, I resolved to do everything I could to make sure this doesn’t happen again. I signed gun control petitions, global sympathy cards, joined memorial web pages and shared it all via social media. I made a green Sandy Hook memorial ribbon my Facebook profile picture, and I won’t take it down until I see legislative changes in gun control.

This is not a sole solution, however. We need to address mental health in our homes, schools and workplaces. Parents, teachers, students and colleagues… we all need to expand our involvement in the world around us. It’s ironic: we now have instant access to everything and everyone through technology, but this has only served to isolate us even more. Today’s children can spend hours playing video games, surfing Youtube, or texting but put them in a room with other people and the silence is deafening.

I think the greatest lesson we can teach our children is empathy. And lack of empathy is a clear indication that an individual is struggling with inner demons and needs help. We are innately social beings, and to feel empathy for other living things we need to interact with them on a personal basis–not via a game console or keyboard.

A few days after Christmas, I sat among fellow humans in a movie theater five minutes from Newtown watching Life of Pi. I loved the movie and everything it made me question and discuss with my family. I’m not a religious person, but I think a spiritual one, and I was especially touched by the catholic priest’s lesson on the suffering and subsequent death of Jesus… I understood it to mean that human suffering was meant to teach us love and empathy; without it these two tenets of life would not be possible. Unfortunately we are surrounded by suffering and senseless tragedies, so we’ll never know if a “perfect” life is indeed possible, but let us all embrace what we have and one another for all that we share. And perhaps that’s the key to happiness.

Forget my dinner-table New Year’s resolutions to write more and lose ten pounds. I resolve to be happy in the here and now. To cherish today and those around me in honor of those who no longer can. That’s the best present of all.

Note: Last week I took a webinar course on “How to Write About Your Life” with Penelope Trunk, a wildly successful blogger, author and entrepreneur. She also has quite a wild history and an edgy present. I learned a lot but came away questioning whether I had the chops to successfully write about my own life without boring my readers to tears or at the other end of the spectrum, trying to get sued. I wrote this post for Penelope after she critiqued our writing the night before.

I woke up with a pit in my stomach and that slight twinge of acid tickling the back of my throat. You’d think I had stumbled home after a late night, taken a face-plant in bed for a couple hours and was now debating how to hit “stop” on the salad spinner that had become my bedroom. But no. I’m simply waking up after spending last night on a webinar with the masterful Penelope Trunk. She devoted an hour and a half to us, her eager pupils, giving us her secrets on how to make money by writing about ourselves. Then she proceeded to trash all of the bits and pieces of our lives that we so tentatively offered.

I can’t say I was surprised by her reaction to my blog post about my father. She’s right. It’s a eulogy of a great, happy-go-lucky guy whom I loved very much and miss even more. And though I am compelled to pick at scabs in real life, I was adeptly circling the pus-infested wound of my father’s death. How his life-is-good-and-I’m-the-life-of-the-party philosophy was mostly fueled by alcohol and the perks of his profession, and that in the end, when the rug was pulled out from under him and he faced a life with neither of these essential elements, he gave up.

I’m mad as hell at him for this.

He always joked that he’d die early, and if not, then he asked if we would please kill him before sentencing him to life in a nursing home or hospital. We laughed it off each time, not imagining we’d ever have to adhere to his wishes a mere two months after his 66th birthday.

But back to my post-Penelope hangover. The sour pit in my stomach is a festering nugget of fear. Fear that I am too normal (i.e., boring) to be a good writer.

I’m a good girl with a generally happy, healthy life. I don’t have cancer. I’m not depressed. I’ve never been in debt or addicted to prescription drugs. I’m married to my college sweetheart, have a wonderful daughter and son, and I grew up in a Happy Days/Griswold-mashup household. I am as hum-drum as Richie Cunningham.

But I’ve watched both my father-in-law and my father die. I’ve seen the life rush out of these cornerstones of our family. The last halting breath. Skin going blue and seeming to shrink into itself. That eerie out-of-body feeling like you’re watching an overly dramatic Lifetime movie (is that redundant?) through a long dark tunnel.

Is grief enough to make me worthy of a reader’s attention? To get them past being pissed off at my Leave it to Beaver life? I might argue that it’s precisely the carefree nature of my first forty years that left me so utterly unprepared for the full-force smackdown of death. I was knocked to the mat, and I’m just trying to figure out how to pull myself up. I’m grabbing at the shaky ropes now like everyone else, just hoping I’m better prepared for the next right hook.